Article
From dusk to dawn: Local party
organization and party success of
right-wing extremism
Party Politics
1–13
ª The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1354068813511381
ppq.sagepub.com
Elias Dinas
School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, UK
Vassiliki Georgiadou
Department of Politcal Science and History, Panteion University, Greece
Iannis Konstantinidis
Department of International and European Studies, University of Macedonia, Greece
Lamprini Rori
Centre de Recherches Politiques de la Sorbonne, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne
Abstract
A marginal racist organization, Golden Dawn, managed to attract first the votes of almost one out of 14 Greek voters and then
global media and public attention. How did an extreme right groupuscule invade the political terrain of an EU-10 member state?
Existing attempts to account for this phenomenon point to demand-side explanations, related to the political turmoil that followed
the notorious debt crisis and the accompanying austerity measures. These explanations, however, fail to account for the genesis of
this trajectory. We delve into this exact question, focusing on the election that marked the emergence of the Golden Dawn and
permitted further electoral penetration. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, we show that the party took advantage
of favourable political circumstances developing a grassroots network of protection that helped it enter the central political arena.
Keywords
Right-wing extremism, grassroots activity, Greece, political opportunity, new party success
Introduction
On the night of the elections of 6 May 2012, overwhelmed by
the score of 6.97%, Nikos Michaloliakos, leader of the Golden
Dawn (Greek: Xrus
ZAug
Z [Chryssi Avgi], GD), shouted on
camera ‘Veni, vidi, vici’. A few minutes earlier and as a way to
prepare his entrance into the press room, a dozen party activists had impudently obliged Greek and foreign journalists
to stand up, as a way to pay respect to the party leader. This
image marked the unprecedented electoral success of the
GD in the May 2012 Greek election. With this result the GD
became one of the most successful right-wing parties of European extremism. Hardly surprisingly, since then it has been
the centre of media attention throughout the world.1
Almost any successful entrance in an established party
system merits systematic investigation. When this comes
from ‘one of the most extremist political parties’ (Ellinas,
ahead of print, 2012) contemporary Europe has witnessed,
the need to delve into the roots of this phenomenon
becomes hardly debatable. How did the GD manage to convert from a marginal activist group into the third largest
party –according to all opinion polls from late 2012
onwards– of the Greek political system?
Often influenced by media coverage, most academic
accounts on GD tend to allude to the importance of
Paper submitted 30 July 2013; accepted for publication 13 October 2013
Corresponding author:
Iannis Konstantinidis, University of Macedonia, 156, Egnatia Street,
Thessaloniki, 54006, Greece.
Email: [email protected]
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2
Party Politics
exogenous factors related to the country’s debt crisis and the
accompanying austerity measures. What remains remarkably neglected, however, is that the turning point in the
party’s electoral fortunes is not the 2012 election. Rather, the
first electoral success for the GD came in the 2010 municipal
election, won by the then incumbent Socialist Party (Panhellenic Socialist Movement-PASOK), in a political context
still largely unaffected by the crisis. It was in that election
and in particular in the election for the municipality of
Athens that GD’s leader received an unprecedented 5.3%
of the vote and was elected to the municipal council. This
was the first representative of GD at a legislative body since
its foundation in 1983. Much of what followed one-and-ahalf years later at the parliamentary elections of 2012, when
its appeal diffused nationwide, is well known through the
international media commentaries. But the Athens Mayoral
Election is crucial to understanding this phenomenon, since
it has marked the emergence of the GD in Greek politics and
has permitted further electoral penetration at the parliamentary elections of 2012.
This paper aims to explain the emergence of the party in
the spotlight at the Mayoral Election of 2010. Combining a
series of semi-structured interviews with residents, observation of residents’ committee meetings and a survey administered in Athens right after these elections, we will argue
that the GD did not emerge as a viable political alternative
due to the breakdown of the current party system. At least
its birth as a significant political party is a story of tiebridging and bonding with local communities. This is
achieved through heightened visibility and the provision
of selective incentives to its supporters in ethnically diverse
neighbourhoods of Athens. GD’s strategy, similar to those
of the National Front and British National Party (BNP) in
the 1980s and 1990s (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2010: 5), aims
at creating a ‘local culture’ that reinforces anti-immigrant
positions through contacts in the local community and
cooperation with local initiatives.
After a brief introduction to the ideological and historical features of the party, we provide a list of demand- and
supply-side explanations of this phenomenon. We then
introduce our organizational hypothesis, which draws on
extensive fieldwork research. This section is followed by
a systematic examination of our hypothesis, which attempts
to account for a long series of competing explanations.
Concluding, we allude to the implications of our findings
for the explanation of the rise of GD and for the genesis
of extreme-right movements in general.
Golden Dawn: More than an antiimmigration party
Two aspects with regard to the GD require our attention – its
until 2010 extremely marginal electoral appeal and its radical
ideological profile. We briefly discuss both aspects in turn.
The party participated for the first time in the 1994 European elections, winning 0.11% of the total vote. Its 0.07%
in the 1996 national elections confirmed its marginal
appeal. Few things changed between then and 2009, when
the Golden Dawn won just 23,564 (0.46%) and 19,636
(0.29%) votes at the elections for the European parliament
and the Greek parliament respectively.
Turning to the ideological outlook of the party, Golden
Dawn’s official documents reveal an ultra-nationalist,
xenophobic, pro-Nazi political organization that is opposed
to all immigrants, regardless of their legal status. It supports
racist ideas with cultural and biological connotations. The
GD supports anti-parliamentarian, anti-political and anticommunist stances and defines globalization, EU and multiculturalism among its major enemies. The organization
defends the idea of an organic interclassist state, which is
a ‘People’s state’ that protects the ‘biological’ and ‘cultural
unity’ of the Greek nation.
Little is known about the party’s internal profile. Following the tactic of other extremist parties, the Golden
Dawn refuses to provide specific information concerning
its organization and membership. Recent electoral successes and the consequent increased visibility have however validated a series of characteristics, which are
common to right-wing extremist organizations. The GD
is a rigorously structured, strictly hierarchical, introvert
organization with very strong leadership. Since its foundation the GD has had the same party leader, who has never
been challenged seriously by internal party rivals.
How did such a fringe party manage to establish itself as
a key actor in the party system? How did 5.3% of Athenian
voters suddenly opt for a party that was until then on the
borders or non-existent? It is to this puzzle that we now
turn, proposing a two-step process, whereby the 2010
municipal election operates as the turning point. Delving
into the determinants of GD success in this election, we
show that although contextual factors enabled political
manoeuvres, significant credit needs to be attributed to the
organizational vigour of the party grassroots and their efficient use of the political opportunities generated in that
election.
The 2010 election as a political
opportunity
Whereas most previous research on the extreme right has
highlighted the role of historical legacies, sociostructural
processes (i.e. modernization, post-industrialization, globalization) and sentiments against the parties and politicians (see inter alia Anastasakis, 2002; Betz, 1994;
Merkl and Weinberg, 2003; Mudde, 1996; Schwank and
Betz, 2003), a strand in this literature has advocated the
importance of opportunity structures, either institutional
or situational (Arzheimer and Carter, 2006; Eatwell,
2003; Goodwin, Cutts & Ford, 2012; Mudde, 2007; Roots,
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Dinas et al.
3
1999; Rydgren 2007; Tarrow, 1998). Following previous
research on the far right (Arzheimer and Carter, 2006:
422–423), we distinguish between ‘long-term institutional
features’ (e.g. electoral system), ‘medium-term factors’
(e.g. level of party polarization or convergence) and
‘short-term contextual or conjectural variables’ (e.g.
immigration) of extreme-right support. As we will see,
only the latter has given room for the emergence of the
GD. Even this set of factors, however, constitutes only
part of the story. The other part is explained by the party’s
grassroots activities, to which we turn in the next section.
It is clear that long-term, stable features such as the electoral system or the nature of the election cannot on their
own account for the rise of the GD. As Norris (2005),
Carter (2002 and 2005) and Van der Brug et al. (2005) have
shown, there is no statistically significant association
between the electoral strength of a radical right party and
the type of electoral system. Against the conventional wisdom that the disproportionality of the electoral system
decreases the voteshare for the radical right, Arzheimer and
Carter (2006) attest the opposite, while Art (2011: 16–17)
emphasizes the strategic use of the electoral system that
mainstream parties attempt vis-a-vis the radical right. In
any case, the electoral system used in the 2010 municipal
election has not changed.
A typical case of second-order elections, municipal elections usually serve as an opportunity for citizens to express
their political opposition to mainstream parties by making
centrifugal electoral choices (Mudde 2007: 235–236; Reif
and Schmitt 1980). Kitschelt and McGann (1995: 99) argue
that local elections represent a political opportunity for
new, and especially anti-system, parties to capture media
attention. Electoral success in these elections might have
upstream effects, if parties succeed in widening their organizational structure throughout the country. To be sure,
these side effects emerge only when parties ‘act quickly
to broaden their challenge to the political system’
(Kitschelt and McGann, 1995: 99) and to ‘create strategies
that enhance their power’ (Ramalingan, 2012). However,
the GD had participated in previous municipal elections
with only muniscule vote shares. Moreover, in the 2010
election it was only in Athens where it saw its vote share
skyrocketing. Clearly, the second-order thesis alone cannot
explain the level of GD support in the country’s capital.
Moving to medium-term factors, the ideological divergence between the mainstream parties on policymaking
related to immigration has left an ambiguous imprint on
public opinion. On March 2010, the Greek parliament
voted in a law concerning the acquisition of Greek citizenship and the voting rights of legal immigrants (see Christopoulos, 2013). The law was highly criticized by the
conservative party of New Democracy (ND) and the populist–radical right party of Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS).
The issue remained high on the public agenda for several
months and denoted a lack of elite consensus. The extent
to which it helped the GD, however, is far from clear.
According to Arzheimer and Carter (2006: 423–424),
divergence between the mainstream parties might either
legitimize the policies of the extreme right or cause a move
to more radical anti-immigration stances by the mainstream
right-wing party of the political system (Arzheimer and
Carter, 2006: 439). True, policy divergence between the
two traditional parties brings the issue forward and gives
anti-immigrant parties the chance to be heard louder. However, the locality of GD success in the municipality of
Athens indicates that it is highly unlikely that this nationwide debate played a pivotal role in the GD’s success.
A factor that is more likely to have favoured GD support
is the absence of another candidate on the right of ND.
Greece’s established anti-immigration party, LAOS,
decided to withdraw an autonomous candidacy in the
2010 municipal elections in Athens. LAOS’s support to the
incumbent conservative candidate is likely to have produced a gap of representation on the right of the political
spectrum, which might have strengthened the transfer of
votes towards the GD candidate, Nikos Michaloliakos.
What happened after the withdrawal of LAOS from the
electoral arena in the municipality of Athens, can be
described as the opposite of what Tarrow (1998) referred
to as the ‘radical flank’ effect: non-extremist far-right parties seem as ‘level-headed’ in the eyes of the voters after
the appearance of extremist parties in the right end of the
spectrum (Rydgren, 2009: 25). In the municipal elections
of 2010 in Athens the absence of a populist radical right
candidate released far-right voters to move further to the
(extreme) right (Koustenis, 2011: 51–52; Gemenis, 2012:
109).2
Yet again, LAOS would not have opted for the ND candidate unless the latter had provided unambiguous signals
regarding his anti-immigration stances. Why, then, would
the potential voters of this party shift to the leader of a marginal organization instead of voting for the incumbent?
Indeed, the hypothesis that the GD attracted only LAOS
supporters does not find support in the data. Even when
looking only at the bivariate relationship between the two
parties, the pattern of correspondence is far from perfect.
Figure 1 depicts the association between the vote share of
LAOS in the 58 municipal sections of Athens in the 2009
general election – the most recent election before the
2010 municipal election – and the GD’s vote share in the
2010 municipal election. Although there is a positive relationship, it is not monotone. Importantly, several outliers
are observed.
This between-district variation indicates that at least part
of the answer about the determinants of GD support is to be
found in the local dynamics generated by the geographical
distribution of new waves of immigrants during the years
before the election.3 Since 2008, irregular inflows of immigrants entered Greece mainly from Turkey and concentrated in certain areas of the centre of Athens.4 This wave
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Party Politics
GD: Vote share in the 2010 Municipal Election
0
5
10
15
4
6
7
8
9
10
LAOS: Vote share in the 2009 General Election
Figure 1. How well does LAOS vote share in 2009 predict
Golden Dawn support in the 2010 municipal elections?
Note: Dots represent the 58 municipal sections of Athens. The
solid black line denotes the local regression curve fitted into the
scatterplot (triangular kernel used). The dashed area denotes the
95% bootstrapped confidence intervals. The highest data point
represents the area of Agios Panteleimonas.
of immigrants was predominantly settled in the neighbourhoods of the 2nd and 6th city districts. According to
repeated evidence from our interviewees, residents of
Agios Panteleimonas (AP), a neighbourhood in the 6th district of Athens, faced an abrupt and massive installation of
immigrants on their return from holidays at the end of summer 2008:
I have no idea what happened then; what game was played by
the government and what we gained in exchange. What I know
is that since the end of summer 2008, the neighborhood was
invaded by hundreds of immigrants. And it is not by accident
that I am using the word invasion. They were sleeping in cartons, living in the playground, selling sandwiches . . . Where
did these people come from? Why were they placed here?
We could neither sit nor pass through the square.5
Map of Athens’ seven districts
Although we do not provide official data for the distribution of the immigrant population in 2008, comparative data
from 2005–2007 to 2008 validate the rapid increase
described by the residents. From 19% between 2005 and
2007 in the city of Athens, immigrants rose to 26.5% by
September 2008 (for data on the evolution of irregular
immigrants in Athens, see Vaiou et al., 2007). Immigrants’
concentration in the 6th city district also becomes evident if
one observes the locality of offices of the different ethnic
groups in this specific area.6
A second contextual factor that might have augmented
the electoral demand of the extreme right is an increase
in crime rates in these areas.7 Regardless of their political
affiliation or ideological predisposition, all interviewees
asserted the problem of criminality and the feeling of fear
that followed it. This issue was constantly high on the
agenda of the regular assemblies of the 6th city district and
was raised by both left-wing and right-wing residents’ associations.8 This should be related to a generalized decline in
the standards of living in this particular area of Athens,
which ‘concentrates most of the contemporary social and
economic problems in urban living’.9 The situation has
been deteriorating since the 1970s as middle-class inhabitants gradually began leaving the city centre for the suburbs
(Arapoglou et al., 2009). Immigrants moved into the housing stock since the 1990s. On the one hand, landlords
exploited the demand for housing; on the other, immigrants
utilized the supply of low-rent apartments, as well as the
disposition of vacant and abandoned buildings.10 The huge
turnover of people staying temporarily in those properties
(the so-called ‘rent per hour’ properties) and the high density of residents per property contributed to the deepening
of urban decline of the city centre.
The combination of rapid increase of immigrant population, high crime rates and urban degradation boosted
the demand for anti-immigrant rhetoric. The propensity
to vote for far-right parties increases when voters consider immigrants responsible for the rising crime (Dinas
and van Spanje, 2011). It was therefore a straightforward task for any anti-immigration party – and the GD was
one of them – to mobilize support, by equating immigrants
with criminals.
Still, however, a crucial part of the puzzle is left out.
How could the GD overcome its marginal status to become
a viable political alternative in this election? Even at their
maximum, all these abovementioned factors constitute necessary conditions for GD’s electoral performance. Eventually, however, it must have been GD’s strategy that
materialized this opportunity. The coexistence of increased
immigration and crime rates does not help us understand
why, for instance, the GD received such a high vote share
in the 6th district but not in the 2nd, which has similar
immigration rates. A careful look at the electoral scores
in the 59 electoral districts of the city of Athens per municipal department shows that, whereas the Golden Dawn won
more than 5.29% in districts with low (<5%) or mediumlevel of immigration (11–20%), it remained below 5.29%
in the second department. Figure 2 presents the relationship
between support for Golden Dawn and immigration rates.
The association is monotone and positive but relatively
weak. Even in the 6th municipal district, GD gained a disproportionate part of the electorate in the neighbourhood of
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5
0
GD: Vote share in 2010
5
10
15
Dinas et al.
Im.%<5%
5<Im.%<10 10<Im.%<15 15<Im.%<20 Im.%>20
Immigration Rates
Figure 2. Immigration rates and Golden Dawn vote share.
Note: Immigration is measured in five categories according to the
level of immigration rates in each of the 58 municipal sections: 1:
<5; 2: 5–10; 3: 10–15; 4: 15–20; 5: >20. The solid black curve presents the local regression line (triangular kernel) and the shaded
area denotes the 95% pairwise confidence intervals.
Agios Panteleimonas (AP) (14.7%, that is 80% more than
the average vote share in the 6th municipal district). Such
findings indicate that there is a local element in the explanation of the GD vote.
Evidence from our survey points to the same conclusion.11 Both panels of Figure 3 plot the relationship
between immigration attitudes and GD support in three different areas of Athens. The left-most panel looks at people’s views on whether immigrants undermine (0) or
enrich (10) the country’s cultural life. We compare residents in the neighrbourhood of Agios Panteleimonas (6th
district), which is regarded as the stronghold of GD’s activities, and residents in the two other districts with crime and
immigrant rates quite as high as those observed in the 6th
district.12 The vertical axis measures people’s propensity
to vote (PTV) score for the GD, measured on a 0–10 scale.
The local regression curves shown in the graph trace the
mean responses conditional on people’s scores on the horizontal axis. Looking at the left-most panel of Figure 3, we
see that not only is there a gap between the residents of AP
and those residing in the other two areas, but this gap is relatively stable across the x-axis. At any given point of the
cultural dimension, residents of AP denote a higher mean
PTV score for the GD than the residents of the other two
areas. If GD’s support was contingent upon the local level
of anti-immigration attitudes, for a given value of the horizontal axis we would observe no difference between the
three curves. The pattern observed here indicates that
irrespective of people’s attitudes on this issue, there is still
a remarkable gap.
The pattern depicted in the right panel of Figure 3 is analogous. The question refers to the economic pros (10) and
cons (0) of immigration. Although the curve for AP is not
exactly parallel to the two other curves, we still find a gap
among those respondents who hold the least favourable
views towards the immigrants. Thus, among people with
equally extreme anti-immigration stances, i.e. people who
believe that immigrants harm the economy, we find a gap
that essentially cannot be explained on these grounds.
Starting from this observation, we will now turn toward
highlighting the importance of another factor accounting
for GD’s electoral breakthrough in 2010, namely the
party’s intentional organizational activity in specific districts of the city. We develop our argument building on our
fieldwork. We then move on to test our organizational
hypothesis using a survey designed especially for this purpose and administered a couple of months after the 2010
municipal elections.
Mobilization, violence and visibility
Studying the electoral success of Vlaams Block in Flanders,
De Witte and Klandermans (2001) highlight the importance
of mobilization processes in bringing the demand for an
extreme right-wing party and the existence of a radical core
of militants – what they call the supply – together. Notwithstanding the growing negative attitudes towards ethnic minorites in the early 1990s in Antwerp, it was through an
intensive neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood campaign that
Vlaams Block succeeded in electorally exploiting demand.13
Lamontagne and Stockemer (2010) also find a strong and
persisting effect of region on vote for Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs - FPÖ) and Alliance for
the Future of Austria (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich -BZÖ)
and argue that living in Carinthia – the organizational centre
of the FPÖ and BZÖ – may have increased popular exposure
to extreme right ideas.
The GD has done anything but underestimate the importance of such mobilization techniques. In the aftermath of
the first round of the Athens 2010 municipal election,
Nikos Michaloliakos unfolded the party’s strategy along
the following lines:
This fight, which ended by the electoral result of the municipal
elections, started through the committees of residents of the
squares of Omonea, Agios Panteleimonas, Attiki, Ameriki. From
all these special people and the even braver women who stood in
the front line in order to resist. We first had the assembly in
Omonea, then the fights in the Court of Appeal. We passed
through the residents’ committees to arrive at this point.14
However conscious and clear in retrospect the strategy
of enhancing power within grassroots initiatives might
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Party Politics
Propensity to Vote the GD
.5
1
Propensity to Vote the GD
0
.5
1
1.5
1.5
6
–.5
0
2
4
6
8
Immigration: Culture
A.P.
2nd District
5th District
0
A.P.
2nd District
5th District
10
0
2
4
6
8
Immigration: Economy
10
Figure 3. The local average level of support for Golden Dawn in one neighbourhood of the 6th district and in the 2nd and 5th districts.
Note: Local regression curves (bandwidth .7) are fitted into the scatterplot (not shown) between attitudes towards immigration (cultural integration; economic role of immigrants) and the PTV score for the party.
have been for the GD, its effectiveness was not taken as
given from the very beginning. How did the GD manage
to gain political acceptance and electoral support among
residents of the 6th district of Athens?
Following a well-known tactic in right-wing extremist
European parties (Mudde 2007: 269), the GD chose the
area of AP as a stronghold in order to acquire a local presence and, through it, greater visibility. AP, as well as the
adjacent neighbourhoods of the 4th and the 6th municipal
districts of Athens, became the headquarters of the organization. In other words, the party adopted the opposite tactic
to what it used over the previous 25 years: instead of being
present all over the Greek territory, after 2008/2009 GD
gathered its forces in a few local areas.
After September 2008, residents of AP were assembling
on a regular basis around the square in order to protest
against immigrants’ concentration and ‘reclaim’ their
neighbourhood. Four different kinds of actors constituted
the scenery: the ‘outraged residents’ who belong to an old
conservative middle class; the GD; the immigrants; and the
‘solidarists’, i.e. left-wing activists expressing support visa-vis the immigrants.
In the beginning I was watching from my balcony. Some residents distributed leaflets and called for protest against the
immigrants. I did not like that. Firstly, I did not know them and
then they were swearing at the government and politicians. I
thought that this was not serious: you cannot succeed in solving a problem by speaking this way. It was not civilized. I
decided to go down. The GD was present on the side of the
inhabitants. On the other side, there were anarchists. I can say
that I was with the GD at that point, because after all, they
were holding the Greek flag and protecting the residents.15
Our research in the area revealed that from 2008 to 2010
there were at least 20 different committees and/or associations of residents. Among them, at least 10 gradually built
ties with GD. Progressively people were divided into two
camps: the ‘outraged residents’ with GD, on the one side,
and the immigrants with leftist activists, on the other.
In the middle there was the police; on the one side the inhabitants, on the other the immigrants’ supporters. And then the
show started. They burnt trashcans, the police threw tear gas and
they left. Then some other immigrant solidary groups showed
up. They were pretending to be in pain for the immigrants, only
in order to cause problems in the neighborhood. Because if one
really cares for one other, he offers food, blankets. On the contrary, these people brought nothing. They were indifferent about
how these people would survive; they only came to make a fuss.
At least, the GD was on the residents’ side.16
Hence, the GD progressively merged with some committees of residents. It used a twofold method, which is a
well-known method in the German National Democratic
Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands - NPD) (Backes and Steglich, 2007) in order to penetrate the local population. On the one hand, cultivating the
image of a welfare state populist party, it provided goods
and services and, on the other, following neo-Nazi tactics,
it used violence in order to ‘protect’ the indigenous against
the ‘rivals’. As far as the first one is concerned, GD offered
security services to aged people and to shop owners of the
4th and the 6th districts, like escorting pensioners to the
bank or the supermarket, and the protection of students,
night bars and restaurants. In the case of criminal acts –
among which the most frequent were street robberies – the
GD offered persecution of the thief and promised return of
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Dinas et al.
7
the stolen goods. It organized events like food distribution
for Greeks in squares of the 4th and 6th districts and, last
but not least, it supported the grassroots movement against
immigrants.17
A characteristic example of the way that the GD provided services is given by one of our interviewees:
On the corner of Fylis and Epirou street, there was a meeting of
the Citizens Committees gathering more or less 60 people. At
some point, a group of Africans, which was approaching,
threw stun grenades. The GD, which was also around, got in
front of the residents, claiming that it will clean up the place.
The GD went in front, the residents followed. The police stood
still. At this point the GD showed that it can realize at least part
of what it defends. The residents saw the GD having power,
whereas the policemen being deprived of coverage.18
This kind of GD activity in particular had a strong
impact on levels of support for the party. By engaging in
the local society, GD operated as a ‘local industry of protection’ (Gambetta, 1993: 2). The supply of protection
made people more sympathetic to the party, regardless of
their atittudes towards immigrants.
Violence is an instrument of double utility in the strategy of the organization: it is used as a means of confrontation with the perceived enemies and as a symbol of
power in order to attract members and voters. From
2008 to 2010, the GD brought into play violence against
three social groups: immigrants, regardless of their legal
status; antifa activists; and socially vulnerable individuals, like drug addicts, homeless people, etc. It hence
exploits the presence of pro-immigrant activists and antifa
groups in order to create acceptance in and proximity with
the local population and acquire visibility. Interactive
extremism19 between pro-immigrant groups and the GD
further divided the inhabitants and reinforced the rightwing extremists:
In the beginning, we didn’t know how to handle the situation
and we made mistakes. We organized continuously antiracist
happenings. This polarized even more the residents and worsened the situation.20
In terms of political communication, the GD took into
consideration its difficulty in national media penetration
and searched for alternative ways to diffuse its message.
A month before the 2010 municipal elections, a highranked party cadre was arguing:
The slogan for our political action is ‘Break the conspiracy of
silence’. The sign that we already have is that we will face a
tremendous war by the mass media. Nobody will mention
us; do not expect such a thing. Hence the only thing that we
are obliged to do is to be 24 hours per day in the streets in order
to propagandize this effort.21
For this reason, GD utilized traditional practices of mass
parties at the local level. It distributed a journal named ‘The
Voice of the Residents of Agios Panteleimonas’. It
exploited door-to-door techniques and organized grassroots
politics, like demonstrations and assemblies, in order to
create a stronghold. For this same reason, it consciously
transferred its headquarters close to the AP neighbourhood.
The Secretary General of GD, Nikos Mihaloliakos, clearly
admits the importance of volunteers and door-to-door techniques in mobilizing support for the party:
They [i.e. the political elites] hadn’t calculated some uncertain
factors, like the existence of crazy volunteers. Because campaigns do not demand only money; they demand the guts of
being a fighter. The same happens in Athens. Dozens of fighters thresh on a daily basis door-to-door, from one car to the
other, from a coffee shop to the other, from one neighbourhood
to the other in order to inform the people. This is how they liberated the square of Agios Panteleimonas and the square of
Attiki. And then, there will follow other neighbourhoods and
quarters and the whole city. Because the city belongs to us.22
According to many analysts of the far-right phenomenon
(Art, 2008; Betz, 1998; Carter, 2005; Lubbers et al., 2002),
party organization is considered to be a crucial factor either
for the rise or for the electoral success of extreme rightwing parties. Golden Dawn is an organizationally solid
party, without internal fracture, that through this seemingly
‘pre-modern’ electoral campaign (Blumler and Kavanagh,
1999; Farrell, 1996) succeeded in augmenting its sphere
of influence, in recruiting and promoting activists, as well
as in placing a series of issues in the public agenda.23
Above all, however, it gained visibility and settled in the
local political terrain. After two and a half decades of electoral misery and general disesteem, GD became a local
acteur politique.
Empirical analysis: Our organizational
theory against alternative explanations
The aim of this section is to put our organizational hypothesis to the test. To do so in a systematic way, we use data
from a survey targeting a random sample of the municipality of Athens and taking place soon after the 2010 election.
Using these data, we will examine our supply-side explanation against other potentially relevant explanations of
extreme-right support, most of which have already been
highlighted in the theoretical discussion.
A first competing explanation is that rather than being
due to is organizational activity, GD’s support in these
areas is due to its particular sociodemographic outlook.
We thus need to control for sociodemographic factors possibly confounding our mobilization effects. Moreover,
related to our previous discussion about the contextual conjectures possibly driving GD support, we need to control
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8
Party Politics
for objective indicators of immigration and crime rates at
the lowest possible aggregation level.24
Related to the aggregate-level immigration and crime
rates are people’s attitudes about immigrants. People who
notice the GD’s grassroots activity might also hold more
anti-immigration views than citizens who are not aware
of the party’s local presence. To account for this possibility,
we need to control for attitudes towards immigration.
Attitudes are of course linked with perceptions. People
may resort to GD if they perceive a personal threat from
immigrants or if they simply perceive crime as an important problem affecting their living conditions. These people
would probably rate the party positively even without having experienced its grassroots activities in their neighbourhood. Thus, we need to take into account individuals’
perceptions about the current state of affairs with regard
to crime.
Attitudes with regard to immigration are measured using
two indicators. The first consists of respondents’ selfplacement on a 0–10 scale on a question about whether
immigrants are damaging (0) or beneficial (10) to the
national economy. The second question captures concerns
of cultural integration, asking respondents to locate themselves on the same 0–10 scale about whether immigrants
undermine (0) or enrich (10) the cultural life of the country.
Perceptions with regard to the status quo in the issue of
immigration are captured with a question asking respondents
to locate themselves on a 1–5 scale with regard to where they
believe the country’s entrance policy stands: (1) free
entrance; (5) absolute restriction. Crime perceptions are
measured by a dummy denoting respondents who think
crime is one of the most important problems the country is
facing nowadays. Moreover, a question asking respondents
whether they or significant others had been victims of a robbery attempt or some other act of violence is also included as
a control. Finally, as another way to account for perceptual
biases that might be linked to GD support without necessitating direct experience with the local party, we include two
binary indicators of media attendance: the first switches on
for people who follow the morning news broadcasts, which
are more prone to cover issues of crime. The second denotes
respondents who watch evening news broadcasts, which
tend to focus more on national political matters.
A final factor that needs to be taken into account is that
the GD is not only an anti-immigration party. It is also an
ultra-nationalist party with a discourse based on racial discriminations. Again, GD’s activity might be more visible
among people who hold nationalist views. We thus need
to take into account people’s ideological predispositions
as well as their more generic attitudes towards nationalism
and towards other political representatives of this ideological camp. This is why we also include the classic left–right
dimension as well as respondents’ PTV score for LAOS, as
another way to capture some latent underlying tendency to
vote for the Golden Dawn.
Finally, we need to discuss the measurement of our key
independent variable. Recall that our hypothesis is that, on
top of all the abovementioned factors, GD’s grassroots acitivity significantly improved the party’s electoral performance. Since we cannot effectively measure party
activism, we will essentially deduce it by employing an
indicator of GD’s visibility among our survey respondents.
We combine two proxies: (1) whether the respondent
received a leaflet from the party; (2) whether people have
been informed about GD’s activities in their area of residence either by friends, neighbours or by other acquaintances. Whereas the first indicator captures a specific
observational manifestation of local party organization, it
is far from an exhaustive measure of GD’s activity. This
problem is mediated by the use of the second indicator,
which encompasses various indirect paths through which
the party’s organization might have reached the local community. To be sure, both items might be driven by selection
into networks favourable to the GD. The next section
explains how the selection problem is addressed in the
analysis.25
Instrumenting Golden Dawn’s visibility
Despite the inclusion of a long list of control variables,
there may still be various unobservable factors making the
GD both more visible and more likeable. To miminize this
problem, we use residence in the 4th and 6th districts as an
instrument of GD’s organizational activity. Although its
action eventually spread to various neighbourhoods of
Athens, the party’s core fieldwork during all this period
was Agios Panteleimonas and its surrounding neighbourhoods, extending to the two adjacent city districts.
The use of municipality of residence is based on the idea
that residing in the 6th district is likely to have brought people into contact with the GD. Although such contact is
likely to be the outcome of prior predispositions, most people would most likely continue having no contact with the
GD if they hadn’t lived in this area. To be sure, our instrumental variables estimand will only reveal the causal effect
of GD visibility on GD support, if the following conditions
are satisfied:
1. Ignorability: People may have chosen to either
abandon this area or, conversely, to move to this
neighbourhood as a result of the presence of the GD.
2. Exclusion: Knowledge of municipality status
should not help us predict support for the GD in any
other way than through its increased visibility in
that area. In other words, people living in the 6th
district should not be fundamentally different in
structural or demographic terms not already captured by our control variables from those living in
other areas of Athens.
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Dinas et al.
9
Table 1. The local average treatment effect of GD visibility on GD support.
First Stage
6th municipal district
LATE
2SLS
LARF
1.30 (.653)
1.28 (.660)
.131 (.032)
Note: Entries are OLS coefficients in the first and the second column, LARF estimates in the third column. Robust standard errors, clustered at the
neighbourhood level, into parentheses. N¼1406. The dependent variable in the first column is GD visibility. The dependent variable in the second and
third columns is the PTV score for the Golden Dawn. The following covariates are included in both stages: gender; age; ethnicity; aggregate level of nonindigenous residents at the county level; crime rates at the district level; level of education; employment sector; ‘immigrants undermine/enrich the
cultural life of the country’; ‘immigrants are something bad/good for the economy’; ‘the current policy with regard to entrance restriction is far too
conservative/liberal’; PTV score for LAOS; prior experience of robbery, theft or other act of violence; ‘most often watching TV news in the morning or in
the evening’. With the exception of age, all of these variables are fully factorized.
3. First stage: Knowledge of residence status should
help us predict perceived visibility of GD’s activities.
4. Monotonicity: No one is discouraged from being
mobilized because of living in the 6th municipality.
Assumption 3 states that, conditional on a set of observables, residing either in the 6th or in the 4th district makes
witnessing GD activity more likely than if residing in
another district. In effect, whereas 9% of respondents residing in other districts received a leaflet from the party, 15%
did so among residents of the 4th or the 6th districts. In the
next section, we will also test this assumption controlling
for the whole list of potential confounders discussed in the
previous section.
Monotonicity, criterion 4, is unlikely to be violated in our
setting: people were not discouraged from hearing about the
GD as a result of living in the 4th or the 6th municipal counties. In other words, it is difficult to believe that the GD
would be more visible for people living in the 4th or the
6th district, had they lived in a different municipality.
What is more problematic, however, is to establish
ignorability and exclusion. Violation of either of these two
assumptions would imply that living in the 4th or the 6th
municipal district is related to higher levels of support for
the GD even in the absence of local party organization.
Our story is a story of observables. We believe that
accounting for all factors alluded to above, residents of the
6th district are no different from the other residents of
Athens, but for the increased GD organization. Although
this assumption cannot be readily tested as it would require
observing the same respondents under different residence
statuses, the next section provides indirect but supportive
evidence in this respect.
Results: The IV estimation
The first column of Table 1 presents the results from the first
stage. GD organizational visibility is regressed on the set of
covariates plus a dummy denoting residents from the 6th or
the 4th municipal district. Given the high number of factorized variables included in the model, we cannot present the
full results here. What is of interest is the presence of the first
stage: knowledge of municipality significantly improves our
prediction about whether people were aware of GD’s activities. In other words, the second column presents the twostage-least-squares (2SLS) estimator of the average effect
of GD’s organizational visibility on the propensity to vote
for GD, as instrumented through residence in the 4th and
6th districts. Otherwise equal, knowledge about GD’s grassroots work at the local level seems to boost support for the
party by more than one point on a 0–10 scale.26 This is a
remarkable effect when one considers the very highly
skewed distribution on this scale, whereby only 4% of the
population gave a score higher than 5. The third column of
Table 1 illustrates the same effect using a different estimator.
Given the presence of covariates, the 2SLS estimator is consistent with the assumption of homogeneous treatment
effects. To allow for heterogeneous treatment effects, the
Local Average Response Function proposed by Abadie
(2003) is used. The result from this analysis is almost identical. Again, the same substantive conclusions are drawn.
Knowing about the action of the GD almost doubles the
party’s PTV score.
Conclusions
Before GD entered the central political scene and the
national parliament, it gained representation in the local
politics of the city of Athens. Today, after entrance into
parliament and the escalating trend in the polls, many people try to explain how that happened. The economic crisis
is not the starting point of this electoral rise. Even though
the crisis augments the opportunities for penetration of a
right-wing party among the insecure and poor strata, GD’s
exit from the political margin was already a fait accompli
before the outbreak of the crisis.
Public debate on the causes of the electoral rise of rightwing extremism and the radical right in general tend to
focus on demand-side explanations. Whilst we tried to shed
light on both approaches, our interpretation originates from
the aspect of internal supply. Shorty after the 2004 Olympic
Games euphoria, when the polishing of the city centre was
over, new, massive immigration flows entered the country.
The serious degradation in terms of living standards for the
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10
Party Politics
city residents coincided with a decisive change in GD’s
strategy. It shifted from traditional nationalist right stakes
(national issues, anti-communism), powdered with racism
and violent activities, to a new anti-immigration and prosecurity agenda. At the same time, it no longer opted for
national political presence; instead, it penetrated in specific
local areas in order to turn them into strongholds.
Exogenous and endogenous factors, as well as their
interaction, favoured the electoral breakthrough of the
GD. The organization activated residents’ underlying fears
related to massive concentration of irregular Afro-Asian
immigrants in certain neighbourhoods after the summer
of 2008. But most importantly, it was GD that succeeded
in accessing the local population through residents’ initiatives and committees, mainly interested in anti-immigrant
mobilization. It offered goods and services to Greeks and
thus managed to get identified as an organization that protects the residents while eliminating the foreigners. It was
constantly present in certain city areas, either by taking
action on its own, or by penetrating existing initiatives
organized by right-wing and anti-immigrant-oriented citizens. The frontiers between the extremist organization and
the residents’ committees became progressively porous.
Hence, without being a mass party, GD managed to establish itself on the ground; it gained entrance and interconnected with grassroots activities. GD built a fortress in
the heart of the city, which enclosed its own indigenous citizens; subsequently, it mobilized them against their ‘enemies’ – that is, the immigrants and their supporters.
In our analysis we highlighted the reasons for the electoral take-off of the GD. We found out that internal
supply-side factors such as organizational patterns, activist
recruitment and political campaign strategies, are crucial in
order to gain access to the neighbourhoods of Athens, especially at an early stage, as the GD attempts to establish
strongholds in order to move from the margins towards the
central political arena. Although explanations for the rise of
radical and extreme right parties focus either on the micro
(individual) or the macro (national) level, we emphasize
the meso level, in other words on what has happened in specific neighbourhoods in the city of Athens. Differently
from other meso-level studies we have shown that not only
the social conditions prevailing in the centre of the capital
(immigration, crime, violence) and its sub-local terrain but
also the political opportunities GD had created for itself
(penetration in the grassroots networks, interconnection
between local party activists and activist movements)
played an important role in the rise of GD in the Greek
party system. In analysis of the far-right party family in
post-war European party systems, extreme and radical right
parties have often been seen as the consequence of sociopolitical and economic determinants as well as the preferences of voters. We tried to show the local and even the
sub-local organizational contribution of the extreme right
spectrum in Greece to its rise in the political scene.
Last but not least, the GD story helps us delve into the
genesis of extreme-right movements. Looking at cases as
diverse as the BNP, the English Defence League (Allen,
2011) and the racially motivated neighbourhood defence
organizations in New York (Green et al., 1998), previous
studies have emphasized the importance of local organization through the provision of protection. Focusing on an
extreme-right party, we find that the interplay between violence, protection and grassroots activity shapes the success
and longevity of these movements. The osmosis produced
by party activists and outraged citizens points to the way
supply meets demand and vice versa. Beyond the extreme
right, it might offer an organizational argument on mechanisms of social mobilization and activist recruitment at local
level.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank participants of the panel on the emergence of new parties that was organized at the 2012 International
Political Science Association Conference in Madrid, Spain, for
their comments on a previous version of the paper. We also
acknowledge Takis S Pappas and Nikos Marantzidis for their
helpful comments at several stages of our work. We would also
like to thank all interviewees in Agios Panteleimonas and, above
all, Anastasia Vasilopoulou for familiarizing us with the area of
Agios Panteleimonas. Any errors remain the sole responsibility
of the authors.
Funding
The collection of survey data has been kindly funded by the University Research Institute of the University of Macedonia, Greece.
Notes
1. Our search came up with more than 30 entries in leading
newspapers in France, the UK, the US, Germany, Spain and
Italy oly between just the May and June elections.
2. It is worth mentioning that LAOS also staged a national electoral breakthrough in the 2002 local elections, when its leader
gained almost 14% of the votes as a candidate for the position
of Head of Attica Region. LAOS electoral success in 2002
has been attributed to its media visibility (Ellinas 2012 as well
as to New Democracy’s decision to support a non-party
affiliated candidate. GD’s breakthrough in 2010, when the
party had not gained as much media access as LAOS had in
2002, reveals that other resources, possibly organizational,
can make up for lack of communication resources.
3. In the relevant literature, although political opportunity structures were first and foremost thought of as ‘exogenous conditions’ for social mobilization (Kitschelt, 1986: 58), over the
years it became obvious that ‘most opportunities and constraints are situational rather than structural’ (Tarrow, 1998:
77; Uhlin, 2006: 27). In other words, they are contingent upon
already existing ‘consistent dimensions of the political environment’ (Tarrow, 1998: 76). The content of political opportunities and changes in their nature ‘create the most important
incentives for initiating new phases of contention’ either
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Dinas et al.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
11
referring to social movements (Tarrow, 1998: 7) or to new
phases of electoral resonance concerning the far-right parties.
After 2008 Greece became the country with the most irregular entries within the EU. In 2010 almost all irregular immigrants willing to access the EU flowed to Greece. In 10 years,
from 2001 to 2010, it is estimated that 358,940 immigrants
had entered the country (Kassimis 2012).
Interview with resident from the square in Agios Panteleimonas. Through respondent-driven sampling (Heckathorn,
1997), we conducted 12 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with key figures of the grassroots movement. Since
our purpose was the detailed exploration and understanding
of the local dynamics, the chronological order that the
events took place from 2008 to 2010, the puzzle of interactions between opposing actors and the way that alliances
were created, we carefully selected our informants in order
to include everything relevant to our research cases, as well
as to achieve maximum variation. The identification of key
informants was made possible after the various forms of
observation and participant observation took place. Hence,
we mainly reached leading figures of the anti-immigrant
movement, who developed ties with the GD, but also leftwing activists and (non-implicated/neutral) residents who
described particular experiences from everyday life, like a
schoolteacher of the local public school etc. Generalizability
from the sample to the population was not the purpose of our
study and for this reason statistical representativeness was
irrelevant. Important information was also collected during
observation of six regular assemblies of the 6th District
Council, as well as obervation of six regular assemblies of
the City Council. Last but not least, our knowledge of
debates regarding the city centre was nourished by following a multidisciplinary seminar organized by the National
Centre of Social Research on the transformation of the city
centre, entitled ‘The Athens City Center from the 19th to the
21st century. An interdisciplinary approach’. More information available at: www.bigbananaadventures.com/seminaria.php?id¼2&tp¼1&id2¼307.
For instance, the Congolese, Tanzanian, Somali, Kenyan,
Ethiopian, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Guinean, Gambian,
Senegalese, Nigerian and Sudanese communities maintain
their offices in the 6th city district. In the municipal market
of Kypseli – another neighbourhood of the same district –
Greek language courses are given to immigrants.
Source: Annual Data of the Ministry for Citizens Protection.
Information gathered by research in the field and participant
observation of the regular assemblies.
Resident’s quote during the regular meetings of the Movement
of Residents of the 6th City District. Notes collected during
participant observation. Among these social problems, one
ought to mention the dense concentration of brothels (according to residents there are between 105 and 250 in total, many of
which function illegally), drugs and human trafficking, installation of homeless and drug addicts, irregular trade, substantial
lack of green, open and common public spaces.
10. For an image of full and vacant buildings in the area of Agios
Panteleimonas, see www.hiddenathens.info/2010/12/agios_
pantelehmonas_casestudy/
11. The analysis is based on a random survey of 1630 individuals
residing in the municipality of Athens. More about the survey
follows in the next section.
12. To be more specific, the graphs refer to three districts: 6th, 2nd
and 5th. According to the Athens Municipality records for 2009,
the percentages of non-indigenous population for the three districts were 22%, 17% and 14% respectively. Attempted robberies per person for each of these three districts for 2010
ranged from 0.017 for the 6th district to 0.014 for the 2nd and
0.012 for the 5th. Records were provided by the Athens Metropolitan Area Police Authority at the level of police station and
were aggregated at the district level by the authors.
13. De Decker et al. (2005: 163) have pointed out the strategic
choice of Vlaams Block to concentrate on the problems of the
old city neighbourhoods in Antwerp in a period when ‘traditional parties left the neighbourhoods’ and ‘became alienated
from the electorate’. Using the terminology of Warmenbol
(2009), these are explanations that focus on ‘the meso level’,
i.e. ‘on (social) settings like the neighbourhood, city or
region’.
14. Speech of the GD leader, 26 October 2010, www.youtube.
com/watch?v¼SyxQlIibYYQ
15. Interview with inhabitant of the square of AP.
16. Interview with inhabitant of the square of AP.
17. Even though the social services of GD ‘only for Greeks’ have
been challenged, data from our fieldwork confirm the adoption of such practices even before 2010.
18. Interview with inhabitant of the square of AP.
19. For an exploration of the notion see Richards B (2013).
20. Interview with left-wing activist, resident of the 6th
district.
21. Speech of Elias Kassidiaris, 12 September 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v¼0vM1CDNn108&feature¼related
22. Speech of the Secretary General of GD, 26 October 2010,
www.youtube.com/watch?v¼SyxQlIibYYQ
23. The importance of mobilization mechanisms in the electoral
endurance of radical right parties is also underlined by Art
(2011), who focuses on the ‘microdynamics of party building’, associating those mechanisms with the radical right activists’ profile. Within the local activists who built ties with
GD, we roughly recognize aspects of the ‘tripartite typology’
of radical right activists (‘extremists’, ‘moderates’, ‘opportunists’) proposed by Art.
24. We include gender, age, ethnicity, level of education, employment sector and a dummy denoting whether the respondent has
property in the 6th district. With the exception of age, all other
covariates are fully factorized. Aggregate immigration data
have been found in the Athens Municipality records, while
crime rates have been provided at the neighbourhood level
by the Athens Metropolitan Area Police Authority.
25. Although more restrictive, the first proxy constitutes a more
direct indicator of local party organization than the second.
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Party Politics
Thus, we replicated the analysis using only the question about
whether the respondent received party leaflets. This analysis,
described in the footnotes of the following section, produces
results that are substantively very similar to those presented
in the main text.
26. When using only ‘leaflets’ as a proxy of GD organizational
activity, the first-stage estimate becomes .048 (.0119) and the
2SLS estimate becomes 3.29 (2.03).
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Author biographies
Elias Dinas is a Lecturer of Politics and Research Methods at the
School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, UK. His research interests include the dynamics of political socialization, political psychology and political methodology.
Vassiliki Georgiadou is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science and History, Panteion
University, Greece. Her current research interests focus on political behaviour, social cleavages, right-wing parties, political
extremism and consensual model of democracy with special
emphasis in Central and North Europe.
Iannis Konstantinidis is an Assistant Professor at the Department
of International and European Studies, University of Macedonia,
Greece. His research interests focus on the impact of values on
electoral behaviour as well as on minor centre parties.
Lamprini Rori is a political communications expert. She is currently finishing a PhD thesis on comparative politics at the University of Paris, France. Her subject focuses on party change
process by the means of political communications.
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